Here’s how these things work:

The lawyer sends a letter to the person unlawfully in the property. He gives a specific date to leave by, or be evicted. The person either leaves, or doesn’t.

The “leave by” date can be as soon as five days if the person owes rent, or two weeks, which is considered reasonable by most courts. These times vary according to case specifics.

Then the lawyer (or landlord, but I’m using a lawyer) goes to the General Court and gets an eviction notice. This part gets interesting. If you don’t put an amount of money the person unlawfully in your place needs to pay as damages, you can get caught in something you don’t see coming. This is what happened to me the first time when I filed by myself without legal help.

A person who is evicted by the general court has about 10 days to get out, depending on circumstances. But if they want to appeal in Circuit Court, they can pay the damages and then appeal. So if you don’t put any damages down, they can appeal immediately and those cases can spin for literally months, said the nice lady at the General Court. She’s the one who explained I would need to seek damages. That became a catch-22, but her advice was sound.

So now we go back to court on Monday, and file for a court date to serve a formal eviction. This close to the holidays, we are hoping for before Christmas, but we shall see. Last time I got one within 10 days, which was a pleasant surprise. But because my earlier letter telling the guy to do the work or leave didn’t mention money, the judge ruled that the eviction didn’t match the original letter and shouldn’t have been served. So we had to start over.

Now that it’s all been done with proper legal attention (and fees paid) we go to court pretty close to Christmas, and all being correct he should be out for the New Year.

I have sage waiting to smudge the place. And prayers for new beginnings for all of us.

Honestly, I feel for the guy. He’s blown so many of his chances, and now he’s blowing this. Big time. I would have used the thousand dollars I gave the lawyer to get him into a shelter housing place. But not now. This has to end.

We can talk more about the details later, but that’s the legal skinny at this time.

And the number of people who have contacted my privately, or stopped me in town, and said, “This happened to me/my mother/my son” is astounding. That’s why I am documenting the emotions and activities now, and why I’ll probably pitch this as a book later. It’s a near universal experience: invite somebody in, and they turn out to be the big bad wolf dressed as grandma. Be careful out there. Compassion and carefulness don’t need to be at odds with each other.